Customer Reviews

Cook'n Recipe Organizer

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I don't think I have ever had such a hard time trying to do something that should be so simple. I bought it to organize the family recipes I have, many of which are written on pieces of paper ripped out of notebooks or on worn and barely legible 4x6 cards. The instructions are muddled and unclear, the set-up is much more complicated than it really needs to be, and everything I try to enter gets deleted because it won't let me save. My advice? Save the money. You're better off keeping the stained and dirty 4x6's that your great-grandmother wrote out.

I was interested in using this program to organize my own family recipes, and not so much in the recipes it comes with. It has been great in that regard. Entering recipes is unbelievably quick and easy. The program has a glossary of ingredients, so fills in the ingredient as soon as you start typing it. It also knows to turn the ingredient to the plural if you are using more than one (will change "egg" to "eggs" by itself.) You can print recipes out on a number of formats, including recipe cards or special-size paper. It also has an extensive library of recipes of it's own, plus a feature where you can sign up to have the web site send you new recipes. I did not take advantage of that feature.

My wife received Cook'n Recipe Organizer as a gift. Unfortunately, the software is terrible. The interface is clunky and terribly frustrating (how do I get back to that recipe I was just looking at?). Evidently, the developer, who works from a garage in Utah, has never heard of the Windows Interface Guidlines. The UI looks like it's 10 years old and is in need of an update, if not a complete overhaul. Some export functions are on the File menu, others are on the Options menu for some strange reason.

If this was a freebie download, I could understand it. The fact that it's sold as a commercial product is inexcusable. It's not ready for prime time in my opinion.

This is an easy and very helpful program. Georgia said it all and I completely agree. It's a powerful program that you can use in your own way. Use their recipes, or enter your own recipes, make weekly or monthly menu's, generate grocery lists, etc., and all done quite easily, IF you've read the directions, OR WATCHED THE VIDEO'S on their website. Great program. I highly recommend it!

As a working mom on maternity leave, I was trying to use this to automate my current process- about 50 recipes get used from a couple of books and a lot of single pages torn from magazines, monthly I make a meal plan and weekly I revise it and put together a grocery list. The headaches are in finding the recipes, determining the grocery list, and minorly in setting up the monthly plan to keep from having spaghetti every night. I have started entering my recipes and have about 32 in- I consider it drudgery, but the software is somewhat helpful. Iam now playing with how it generates a grocery list, and I am thinking the software is trying to be too smart- trying to determine what size of a container I need to buy rather than what was written on the recipe, and I certainly dont want to be told brand names- I just want a SIMPLE grocery list, and would prefer to eliminate the brand names- seems like advertising I dont need. I plan to keep fiddling with this product and get as much use out of it that I can. Overall, I think its a good product if there arent better recipe programs out there yet.

Despite what all the information claims, this program is not fully functional with Windows Vista. If you go to the company's website, they admit this right away and tell you only there most recent, $80 program runs with Vista, and downloading that will fix all your problems. A complete bait-and-switch on what, from everything I've read and seen, is horrible software in the first place.

The video tutorials are great. The program is average compared to others out there.
My biggest peave is that, after trying a number of programs, I found one I liked better. Dan Oaks refunded only my purchase price--NOT THE 200% HE CLAIMS HE WILL DO. He continues to ignore my emails.

Did not realize this was an older version. Program did not function correctly at times due to the MS Vista operation system. Returned it to Amazon for credit.

Installed this program on a VISTA 64 system, after setting VISTA to run the program in XP compatibility mode everything works very well. I love the self-completing features for ingredients when entering recipes.
I have never really understood why so many people seem to have problems with VISTA. I have installed it on all three of my XP machines with no real issues other than reading the instructions and following them. This software is no different. If you are loading a pre-VISTA program on a VISTA machine and are having problems, try the compatibility mode as instructed by Microsoft!
DUH!!

I have the version of this software previous to V8 and plan to upgrade to 8 for the new features.

My wife loves this program. And it is expandable. You can add other recipe programs to it by just buying them and downloading them, simple. Also add your own recipes, simply great.